[simplicityinsound]

So...after a lot of prep work, i am really happy to announce that as of two weeks ago, the new Simplicity In Sound officially opened for business and started taking in cars for real (the accord sedan posted earlier was more of a practice round for Joey and I)

This past week, we finished three of the first batch of builds and here is the first among them. I was primary on this project, but i am sure when you look at the pics, you will be able to tell haha.

The car is a 2012 Honda Accord Coupe, and the goals are:

1. stealthy and clean job for a daily drivfer

2. achieve a nice level of sound quality

3. retain as much usability and trunk space as possible

so, lets get started.

one of the best things about having Joey as part of S i S is his ability to fabricate metal mounting brackets. Previously, i would have found a piece of car's plastic or metal to secure a fuse holder, but now, this accord gets to have a custom made metal bracket just for that purpose, bolted to OEM holes

here are the two pieces of metal bracketry that Joey fabbed up and painted:

Utilizing a best kits dash kit, we installed a pioneer avh-x5500BHS double din unit, the customer already had an aftermarket screen/nav module installed in the upper dash location, i simply tied the two together and removed some functionality from the top module such as blue tooth, that will now be handled by the Pioneer.

here is a shot of the wiring harness organized and bundled behind the dash with the PAC steering wheel control retention module:

The car utilizes a mosconi 6to8 DSP for all signal processing, and all tuning can be done from the front seat via a BT enabled laptop for wireless tuning

For the front stage, i evaluated the a pillar for the tweeter mounting, but in the end, i realized that in order to clear the instrument cluster shroud, i would have to space it up so high that it would have negated any advantage for depth of stage. So we went with a totally OEM look.

here are the two doors in their finished form, virtually 100 percent OEM:

but behind the scenes, first, two sets of speaker wires are run into each door:

then the outter door skin received a roughly 25 percent coverage with Focal Blackhole Tile, which greatly helped with reducing their resonance:

next, the tiny oem openings were trimmed out a bit, and four rivet nuts were secured to the metal:

next the entire door was sound proofed with STP foam and CLD damper around the speakers:

we fabbed up these spacer baffles for the speakers and coated them thoroughly with truck bedliner to protect them against the elements:

then these baffles were bolted to the door via the rivet nutserts we put in earlier:

and a set of illusion audio Carbon C6 midbass was secured in place:

the inside of the plastic door card then received a bit of STP damper to prevent resonance:

the same procedure was then repeated on the passenger side:

moving onto the tweeters, here is what they look like now, a seasoned accord veteran will notice that the grill is covered in grille cloth instead of the OEM plastic:

here is what i did:

first, i took apart the oem tweeter housing and snapped off the grille:

then i prepped the illusion carbon tweeters for mounting by removing their protective grille, which would have made them too high for the OEM grille piece. i was also not impressed with the small opening on the stock grille, so i hollowed them out to fully expose the copper dome of the C6 tweeter:

the illusion tweeters were then secured to the tweeter pods from the backside:

and the oem grilles wrapped in HD grille cloth:

then these new grilles were secured to the pods via HD epoxy, and on the inside, i threw on some more STP damper to help reduce any resonance as the C6 tweeter can reach fairly low

 

[simplicityinsound]

next come a series of pics that show the wiring bundle traveling from the front of the car to the back and into the trunk, neatly bundled and ziptied every few inches. on the driver side went the RCA, remote turn on and left hand speaker wires, while the passenger side got the power cable and right side speakear wires:

so thats it for the interior, moving to the trunk. as mentioned, the goal was for simple, stealthy and save as much trunk space as possible. so, here is the normal view, which presents virtually an OEM look with zero space lost.

note that the OEM carpet already seems to be of two different hues, i matched the new trunk floor carpet to the original floor cover, which is virtually identical the front portion oem carpet, the back sides seems a lil darker but some of it is just lighting.

this is also a really oddly shaped floor, with the floor getting super narrow at the front, so what i did was pretty simply, i roughly followed the shape of the floor and designed a simple cutout. pop off the breathable grille and here is what you see, two Mosconi ONE amps towards the back, flushed trimmed, and a single illusion audio Carbon C10 10" sub at the front, recessed to clear the magnet. i used a grey vinyl that matched the exterior of the vehicle for a simple clean look. A ONE 120.4 sends 120 watts to each tweeter and 350 to the sub, while a 240.2 sends 240x2 to the midbass

so, lets get on with some build pics

first the spare tire well was sound proofed and four rivet nuts were secured to the floor:

then a single foundation board was bolted in place, this will act as a mounting mount for everything else that follows:

next i made a .65 cubfeet enclosure that is very long, and fairly wide, but very shallow, exactly the type of situation that the illusion carbon subs are designed for,. the front of the sub is fiberglass to help it go as far forward as possible:

a trime piece was then secured to the opening so no bare MDF would show through the sub mounting cutout:

this is the spacer for the sub before and after vinyl, at 1-5/8" thick, i was quite impressed that i was able to wrap it all in a single piece of vinyl...

this is the main cosmetic trim panel before and after vinyl:

this the top floor board, which is 1/8 mdf sandwiched with a piece of 3/8" at the weight bearing points:

this is the breathable grille:

both pieces was then wrapped in trunkliner, and then dyed to a darker shade of grey to better match the oem carpet:

and finally, some shots of the wiring organization under the floor:

So thats it, how does it sound? as usual, i am really happy with the way Illusion audios perform. in the stock locations, the stage is nice and wide with decent depth. center image can be a bit more precise with a dash mat i feel but is with in a 3-4 inch diameter below the rear view mirror. midbass is strong and controlled with good smooth midrange and highs...while lacking no detail.

the illusion C10 once again sounds nothing like a shallow sub, and provides full rich bass throughout the cabin. quite a nice daily driving SQ system

it should be mentioned that this C6 set is my first experience with the new and improved tweeters...and when i looked at the tweeters on the RTA with NO EQ, i was blown away by what i saw (and confirmed with my ears)...

this my friends, is a pretty nice curve for a stock location tweeter on just basic xover (2300hz at 12db)

thats it for this episode, gonna work on our second build log right now!

b

 

[edzyy]

Beautiful work.

 

[mSaLL150]

As usual, awesome work!

My new car will have the exact same stock speaker locations, I've considered just sticking with the factory locations as long as the sound is decent. Looks like this is proof that it can work!

 

[wannabesq]

I'm curious about the Upper screen. Is that the Farenheit unit? What sort of functionality does it retain after having the OEM radio removed? My understanding is that it just replaces the OEM screen, and augments the factory radio, but has no radio of its own, just bluetooth, nav and iPod controls.

I have a 2008 accord and want to do something similar. From the looks of this, my idea will work just like I had hoped.

Great build btw. It's always nice to see the same car with a different goal in mind.

 

[strong*I*bumpin]

There are two top screen units available for the 8th Gen Honda,Farenheit & Power Acoustik makes them.They can be tied into a aftermarket HU's.A guy did it over at the Drive Accord Forum.The only reason I've not gone with a aftermarket unit in my '11 Accord because I don't have the top screen unit like in this thread.The LX-P model comes with a simple display which will go dead if a aftermarket HU is installed.BTW I did a similar tweet set up last year,thought this looked familiar..

 

[strong*I*bumpin]

Sorry for the jacking.Nicely done as always.

 

[simplicityinsound]

yeah this was a fahrenheit, i didnt know much abou tit, but it seems like a real nice solution for these cars

b

 

[ADCS-1]

As always, i`m really impressed of your attention of details, and the wiring is far over my level.

 

[bbfoto]

Bing, this is one of your cleanest installs yet. Really nice work from top to bottom.

 

[mrmill]

Nice install

 

[ohmgrown]

Between this install and the NSX I was reading about yesterday, I really don't think I'm going to need to look anywhere else for inspiration. Fantastic work, guys.

 

[moparman79]

Nice... sweet setup once again Bing, looking great. I know what you mean about the new tweeters, they are so sick and detailed. by far the best tweeter Ive heard without even being hooked up to a dsp. I cant wait to get these installed in the challenger.

 

[audiozone]

Congrats for the nice work! looks very clean. I have a question about the tweeters, those are designed to have a removable grill? or you did some trick there?

If you dont remove the original grill of the tweets, there is no way to acomodate them inside the original tweeters space?

Thanks!!!

 

[simplicityinsound]

Congrats for the nice work! looks very clean. I have a question about the tweeters, those are designed to have a removable grill? or you did some trick there?

If you dont remove the original grill of the tweets, there is no way to acomodate them inside the original tweeters space?

Thanks!!!

Iirc the grilles will interfere w the mounting a bit. But even on cars where the new tweeter grille fits behind the stock one. We remove the tweeter grille anyway because having two grilles looke unfinished to us.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk 2

 

[audiozone]

Iirc the grilles will interfere w the mounting a bit. But even on cars where the new tweeter grille fits behind the stock one. We remove the tweeter grille anyway because having two grilles looke unfinished to us.

Thanks for the answer guys, I agree with you, two grilles might be easier but doesnt seem very good, you have very good attention to details. But I ask because although I dont have illusion tweeters in my hands right now, I think I didn't see an easy way to remove the grills, could you give some advice on that?

Thanks!!

 

[strong*I*bumpin]

The grill is also the housing for the stock tweet,you can cut out the housing part but the grill itself won't be able to snap back into the sail panel.What I've done was use a small format tweet with a baffle cut to size,then insert both into the OEM tweeter housing secured with hot glue & a strip of deadening.If you need pics lmk.